Studies in the Languages of Columbia Vol. 6: Desano Grammar

PANAMA

Pacific
Ocean

VENEZUELA

COLOMBIA

•BOGOTA

Vaupes: area where (••— * ^ \\
Desano communities L., " "^

are located "'pi-<^

ECUADOR •

<:' \

[ BRAZIL
I.

^

PERU / I

1

Introduction

The Desano people^ live in the southeastern part of Colombia in the
department called the Vaupes and also across the border in Brazil. The
majority live on tributaries of the main rivers, the Vaupes and the
Papuri. Some have settled among other indigenous groups in larger
communities along the Vaupes and Papuri rivers. In these communities
the children generally grow up speaking the language of the dominant
group rather than their own language. This is usually their mother's lan-
guage since Desanos are not allowed to marry Desanos; rather, they
marry cross-cousins or others from the neighboring indigenous groups
who also belong linguistically to the Eastern Tucanoan language family
(Waltz and Wheeler 1972:128). Those with Desano parentage (father)
number around 1,000 people. Although many Desanos can speak Span-
ish with varying degrees of fluency, in their own villages they almost
exclusively use their own language. Most small children and older
adults know almost no Spanish, although they understand other
Tucanoan languages because of cross marriages.

There are twenty-two Desano dialects. The names of the dialects are
listed in the Desano-Spanish school dictionary (Miller, to appear). Each
dialect represents a group called children of 'the name of the group'.
The Desanos themselves have arranged the various groups into hierar-
chical order. The top group is boreka pord *bass fish children', and the
lowest group is dJMkerd or oyoa 'servants'. In the middle of this hierar-
chy is a subgroup called si?bia hdsd. In this subgroup there are three dia-
lect groups. They live in Brazil, and the Desanos of the other groups say
that their dialects are mutually unintelligible with the rest of the

1 The Desano people use the form wff-a for their language and language family. The origin
of this term is not known. They use wtd when referring to themselves in Desano, but call
themselves Desano in Spanish.

2 Desano Grammar

groups. The top groups are said to be the older brother of the others,
and the lower groups are called 'our grandparents'. We have made com-
parisons among four groups, and the greatest differences have been
noted between the boreka pora 'bass fish children' and the suhuperu pora
'type of fish children' dialects. The main difference is noted in the sen-
tence introducer word 'thus' that is very commonly used. In the former
dialect it is eropa and in the latter daha. Examples in this grammar are
from the horeka pora dialect, as is the material in Kaye's thesis.

The following is a typological summary of Desano which shows that
Desano has most of the correlates of an SOV language.

Miller, Marion. 1999. Desano Grammar. Studies
in the Languages of Columbia Vol. 6. Dallas:
Summer Institute of Linguistics.